What is the opposite of the middle? Dark has light, truth has lies, God has Satan, but what (or who) is the middle’s foil? Theories abound, but it is the four gentlemen in Picnic Lightning who claim dominion over that murky abyss. They may hail from where the west begins, their feet may stomp Fort Worth concrete, but their music dwells in the shadowland of trenchant questions and orphic revelations. After releasing its Gilded Youth EP in the fall of 2014, Picnic Lightning went straight to work on new material at shows and in the studio. The eight tracks on the self-titled debut LP are what was left from a thirty-song list on a dry-erase board wielded down by trial and error, and an adherence to the band’s mantra from day one: let no one suffer. In many ways Picnic Lightning’s debut LP serves as a chronicle of their sonic, enlightening and ruinous experience since the release of Gilded Youth. It’s a chronicle of their life in the middle - a tribute to fear first tasted, total despair first felt, and reality at last acknowledged. On this LP, Picnic Lightning deftly touches the inexhaustible complexities of life and does so with sonics as singular as the individual human experience. The eight songs on this LP croon when they want to holler, stomp when they want to skip, wax thoughtful where vengeance belongs; and vice-versa. It's the fuel that sets your car aflame or gets you home; the drug that puts you down or brings out the beast; your first peace or your worst nightmare - the middle claims victory in all cases.